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Warring Stars Wiki
Welcome to the Warring Stars This is a Wiki housing my Warring Stars setting for sci-fi role-playing games. The Warring Stars Era begins in the second half of the 25th century and lasts many, many years. The 'present' is the year 2488, a year of no great significance... or so it appears. The nations of the stars strive against each other, while the little folk struggle to live their lives under the shadows of wars great and small. A Few Assumptions Faster Than Light travel is cheap and plentiful - Blink drives, the devices that allows for instantaneous travel between stars, have been around for centuries. While not quite as ubiquitous as automobiles in the 21st century, any reasonably well-off company or individual can afford a small blink-capable starship. This affordability has made possible the millions of Spacers, independent or small-company merchants who transport modest cargos from star to star. Earth-like planets are everywhere - As of this writing, only a few more or less Earth-like planets have been discovered in the real world. This is likely to change as the search becomes more sophisticated and larger in scale. Either way, though, the galaxy of Warring Stars is full of terrestrial planets suitable for Human colonization. Most require a bit of terraforming first, but terraforming technology is very advanced, and it usually doesn’t take more than a couple decades to make a world ready for settlement. Humanity is alone in the universe - Humanity has been exploring and colonizing the galaxy for around four hundred years and has yet to encounter intelligent extraterrestrial lifeforms. No signals have been received, no communications intercepted, nothing. While extraterrestrial life is common, no intelligent species have been discovered. Well, maybe not - Humanity has yet to definitely encounter living intelligent extraterrestrial lifeforms. There have been several discoveries of alien ruins, built by apparently extinct species, on various worlds. Their fates are unknown. And there was the Cull, a devastating attack on Earth and its colonies that wiped out a third of the Human species in less than an hour. Many believe the Cull was the work of some unknown alien species. Themes Black Market Commerce - Given the fact that most governments have established punishing trade barriers to protect their local industries, and the ease with which said barriers are evaded by the adventurous merchant, it's no surprise that the black market in the Warring Stars era is, in some systems, nearly as large as the legal market. Go forth and sell, sell, sell! Conflict - It's not called the Peaceful Stars era, is it? While the Great Powers are at peace, it's a very warm peace, with plenty of proxy conflicts like the 20th century's Cold War. Local and corporate wars are all over the place, too, and there's no shortage of demand for mercenaries and gun runners. Decadence - Long decades of peace and prosperity in most of the known galaxy have had their negative effects. One of the biggest is an increasing taste for extravagant self-indulgence. The Warring Stars era is one where those with money find all kinds of ways to flaunt it on small and large scales alike. Palaces, hosts of personal servants, casual debauchery, if you can afford it, you have to have it. Exploration - The Known Galaxy is a trivial section of the Unknown Galaxy. Every day, pathfinders and pioneers map a little more of the Milky Way. New star systems are charted and surveyed, and there's money to be made in it. Anybody who finds a system with valuable resources - kuangium deposits are the Holy Grail - is set for life... as long as they can fend off the competition long enough to make the claim legal, that is. Mystery - While governments and corporations of the Warring Stars like to present a tidy, all-questions-answered view of the Galaxy, that's definitely not true. There's thousands of enigmas out there - impossible planets, alien (or pre-historic human) ruins, astronomical oddities, and things that don't even have names. Inspirational Material Battlestar Galactica – The new version, that is. Not so much for the sexy robot apocalypse aspects as the look at government, politics and religion in a society not all that much different from ours. The small differences between the real world and the Twelve Colonies (octagonal paper, different spectator sports, distinctive vocabulary) parallel the differences between the real world and the Warring Stars. Blade Runner – The crowded, grimy urban world of Blade Runner is almost a perfect depiction of life in the Warring Stars, especially Sinha and Tingwok, but really pretty much any long-settled world in the galaxy. A new life does await you on the off-world colonies! Firefly – The good(ish) crew of the Serenity are tied with Han Solo and Chewbacca as the quintessential spacers. Plus the Chinese influences on the ‘Verse map well with life in Tianxia and Zhongguoan client states in the Borders. Lost – No, really. The weird things that happen on the Island are exactly what you run into beyond the Lagidze Gap. Plus intense character drama, if you like that sort of thing. Known Space Over the last three centuries, Humanity has colonized over a hundred worlds and visited hundreds of others, but that's not even a drop in the galactic bucket. All the same, it is almost the limit to practical human exploration. The problem is the Great Wall. The Great Wall is actually an enormous, intangible sphere that contains all of known space. Some quirk of galactic physics has placed Earth and its galactic neighbors inside a vast area almost completely devoid of a rare and exotic form of dark energy particles known as Chan Ribbons. These particles prevent faster than light travel, at least the only method known to humans, and are apparently far more common in the rest of the Galaxy. No physical exploration on a practical timescale is possible beyond the Wall – even the fastest conventional engines would take decades between nearby stars. Only a relatively tiny pinhole, the Lagidze Gap, connects the bubble containing Earth with a largely unexplored neighboring bubble. For now, Humanity is largely confined to the area inside the Wall. That area, while tiny on a galactic scale, is still almost unimaginably vast. Known space extends around two thousand light years from Earth, an area of several million cubic light years that contains well over two million stars. Of course, only a small fraction of these have planets, and only a small fraction of those have habitable worlds. That's still a lot of worlds to keep track of, though. To make some sense of this, humans have divided the known, settled area of the Galaxy into several political and cultural regions, the most important of which are Tianxia, the Borders, the Anglosphere, and the Free Worlds. These are by no means the only regions in known space, merely the most well-known in general. Others include the Arab Rim, the Orion Nebula, the Quadrant Soie, Le Corbusier's Horseshoe, the Lesser Borealis Cluster, and many others. Twenty Most Spoken Languages of the Warring Stars (by native speakers) * Putonghua (Mandarin) * Hindi * English * French * Arabic * Cantonese * Georgian * German * Spanish * Japanese * Portuguese * Venetian * Amharic * Italian * Bavarian * Korean * Vietnamese * Yoruba * Swahili * Scandinavian Tianxia has two meanings. Taken literally, it means 'under heaven' and refers to the entire settled part of the galaxy. A more common use, though, is to refer to what is also labeled the Sinosphere or the Chinese Worlds - those states culturally and politically influenced by old China. In this usage, Tianxia means Zhongguo, Qianzhou, Tingwok and the neighboring Chinese-speaking Free Worlds and Border planets; increasingly, the British Commonwealth regards itself as part of Tianxia, too. The Borders lie clustered between the British, Sinha and Zhongguo states and the Great Wall. The worlds of the Borders, also known as the Shields, the Boundary and other similar names, are nominally independent, but most fall under the discreet control of one of the neighboring Human powers. Between the unsettling mysteries of the Wall and the constant jockeying for position between the three Human powers, it is understandable that Border worlds breed cautious, if not outright suspicious, people. The Anglosphere is an informal name for planets settled by English-speaking countries from Old Earth. Generally speaking, it is limited to the British Commonwealth, the United States of Orion and former Orion planets, but it can refer to any world settled by Britain, the United States, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Canada or a number of Caribbean or African nations. Thus, there is some overlap between the Anglosphere and the Borders, and even more between the Anglosphere and the Free Worlds. Surrounding all of it are the Free Worlds. These planets, independent of any of the great powers, are a vast frontier. People of the great powers may look down at the Free Worlds (also known as the Outer or Trails), but they are (mostly) removed from the cynicism and tension that surrounds the great powers. Beyond the Free Worlds lies the Great Wall, the Lagidze Gap and, except for a handful of Lagidzean colonies and off-the-book outposts, the vast unexplored reaches of Translagidzia, the trailing end of the Local Arm which is truly the final frontier. Spaceships 101 There are two miraculous technologies that make interstellar travel practical and convenient. The first is artificial gravity. Not many people outside of advanced engineers (the kinds who got 3 degrees by the age of 20) can really explain how it works, but work it does - 25th century starships have internal gravity, and without having to revolve around an axis like planets do. Some ships - typically prison carriers and advanced military vessels - have adjustable gravity either in certain parts of the ship or throughout the whole thing, but this is incredibly, incredibly expensive. 99% of all starships get by with a constant 1g from fore to aft. The other is the blink drive. The space empires of man literally wouldn't exist without instantaneous FTL travel and the blink drive is generally regarded as the most important invention since the wheel, or at least the printing press. With it, the entire galaxy is open to exploration and settlement (or would be if not for the Great Wall). Without it, roundtrip travel between even nearby stars such as Sol and Alpha Centauri would take decades. The one drawback of current blink drive technology is that it only propels a ship 50 light years, and the journey strains and heats a ship's engines so severely a 24 hour cooldown is required. Traveling from one end of known space to the other is a long series of 50 light year hops. In dire emergencies, you can do one blink right after the other, but the result, at best, will be a blown out engine when you reach your destination. At worst, you'll be another entry in the Missing Ships registry of your homeworld. Category:Browse